Author: <span>D. A. Hosek</span>

Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina City has always been a fixture of my perception of downtown Chicago. As a child I attended a broadcast of the local children’s television program, BJ and Dirty Dragon from the Marina City TV studios (now the House of Blues), saw Steve McQueen chase the bad guys through the parking garage until they crashed […]

There are few people whose death would make me happy. Limbaugh is one of them. He was a poison in American culture. The only sad thing about his death is that it didn’t come thirty years earlier.

Had I gone to public school in the city of Chicago instead of just outside it, a mandated part of my education would have been learning about Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago. Since that’s a counterfactual, I only learned about the plan in dribs and drabs, a lot of retailed by my father and […]

And now I enter the 700s: Arts & recreation. In the generic category of “Arts” I decided to got with The Lonely City Olivia Laing’s book which is a mix of memoir and examination of the works of artists who treated on the topic of solitude. The mixture of genres within this book worked extraordinarily well and […]

We close out the  600s—Technology—with “construction of buildings.” Since we were planning on doing some renovations, I thought it might be helpful to read a book like Outwitting Contractors. The book itself is padded with a number of anecdotes which made me think that Adler was perhaps at one point a journalist, although there is no […]

We move from “manufacturing” to “manufacture for specific uses” which doesn’t sound too promising, but I managed to find this book about Babbage’s difference engine among the books in this decade and decided it looked like it might be interesting. Babbage’s difference engine is probably the most influential machine that was not finished. It inspired a […]

The 670s are “Manufacturing” and while I was initially nervous about what would be available at my local public library on the topic, I spotted this book about the history of paper and decided that this would be the book for me to read. From my life in typography, I’m reasonably conversant with the history of […]

2021 has gotten off to a decent enough start. I’ve worked on the novel daily without fail—the first part of the month was spent digesting comments on two excerpts that I workshopped with my writing group, then I returned to the chapter I’d left dangling in November, managed to finish a first draft, a rewrite and […]

The first clue was when my submission to the 2020 version of the contest disappeared from  ubmittable without notice. The administrators of the prize tend to be not so great about closing out submissions on Submittable, so I didn’t pay much attention to it (in past years I’d had some marked “completed” a few “decline” and […]